We are Colorblind

That just happened. I was able to few a few pages and then I got the wp-config.php missing error.

Pointing at things asking what colour it is, always happens to me too.

I recently downloaded a handy app, that lets to point your camera at objects and tells you the colour. It's called kleur (iOS), it's pretty cool, has 1500 colours but it's not 100% accurate.

My favourite brown shirt is green. Normally, I don't like brown, but I like that one. I wore it for years thinking it was brown until I said something to my wife that made her look at me funny (ier than usual).

My colour confusion is particular: Certain pinks and purples are grey, certain colours aren't quite right (like my "brown" shirt), and I cannot see red unless it is "bright enough". I see the red of an apple just fine, but Mars has always been a faint object of uncertain colour. I always thought people were waxing poetic until I learned of my colour confusion.

I really do prefer that term, by the way, not for any reasons of political correctness, but because it is far more accurate, and gets people inquiring as to just what I mean. If I say "colour blind", they assume red-green - I have no problems with red or green or Red Green, and see traffic lights the way FSM made 'em.

The only time my colour perception has caused me problems at a computer is when someone insists on pink fonts on grey backgrounds. It's not just that it's hard to read, it hurts. It really, really hurts to look.

For me, there is minimal contrast and no edge definition, so the letters float and shift on the screen and it is painful to look at. Highlight the text, flip the contrast, readability restored.

I've had the exact same experience.

The only situations I've really run across problems with color is with labeling or tagging, if colors play a critical role in distinguishing the tags. This was particularly bad in Trello before they introduced a color-blind mode. I actually dislike the way they handled it. Trello only allows 6 predefined colors for labels, and the colors they picked were particularly bad for those with red-green colorblindness (I could barely distinguish between the blue and purple, and could distinguish the red and orange side-by-side but not identify in isolation); they then introduced a color blind friendly mode that adds unique patterns to the most problematic colors (blue, orange, green). What bothers me about this is that it would have been extremely easy to just pick 6 colors that weren't problematic (red, dark blue, light blue, yellow, black; there, that took me under a minute, and the least you could do is consult a representative of 8% of your users for 30 seconds). Once they realized the colors they'd chosen were a problem for red-green color blind users, I understand why they introduced a new mode instead of changing the colors for everyone, since that would disrupt and confuse many people ("I don't know where I put the card, I just made it purple, and now there's no purple!"), but the problem could have been much more elegantly solved with a bit more forethought.

Summary: color blindness is only a handicap in situations where identifying color is critical. Situations like this aren't that common, but there are cases, and when you're going to put significant thought into picking a color palette it just comes off as lazy and irresponsible (unless there really isn't a good solution—e.g., picking a palette of 50 colors).

As I was ranting a bit about Fog Creek's choice of label colors in Trello (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4330851), I started to wonder: do development shops of 30+ people typically not include anyone who is red-green colorblind? Typically all that's required is to show someone a screenshot and say "does this work?". In the case of Trello labels, I have to assume that no one on the team at Fog Creek was colorblind, and that (i) the palette choice was done lazily, (ii) there was no one with red-green colorblindness at Fog Creek to do a quick "do these work?" check, or (iii) there were very strict design restrictions on what colors could be chosen to fit in with the rest of the site's aesthetic (personally, I think this is a bit silly, because the wacky patterns of colorblind-friendly mode clash a lot with the rest of the site's design, but 92% of users seeing a non-clashing experience may have taken priority). (ii) seems the most likely option. As a left-handed colorblind redhead, sometimes I take my 'deficiencies' for granted, but that just seems odd.

The biggest irony? Assuming statistical independence and that 8% of the population is colorblind, there's an 8% chance that a group of 30 people would not include anyone with colorblindness.